Why Science?
One important reason for science is clear—tightly coupled to engineering and technology, science works. The products of scientists and engineers are tested in the real world every day. Oil companies hire new geologists, geophysicists, and petroleum engineers when the old ones retire because those scientists and engineers do find oil and make money for the oil companies. Congress funds biomedical research because it keeps lengthening our lives and curing diseases. You read this on a computer or phone, which was designed using the principles of quantum mechanics and the remarkable discoveries of materials scientists and engineers.
High school teachers like to expound on the scientific method. Scientists do have a method of sorts, and it helps them achieve their results. But lots of people—astrologers, palm readers, telephone “psychics”—have methods that don’t get funded by industry and Congress. The typical industrial officer is likely to be more interested in the results of science than in the details of how those results were achieved.
Across campus, scientists are sometimes viewed as just another group for sociologists to study. Scientists have their tribes and other social interactions. Scientists occasionally seek fame and fortune, lie, and steal in much the same way that other humans do. The extremists in sociology have gone so far as to argue that science is only a social construct, one of many possible ones. This, however, is the kind of intellectual exercise that gets a few academics in trouble with the real world. Anyone with a little common sense knows that it is possible to have a cruise missile deliver a small exploding device to a selected building in another continent using some clever applications of Newtonian physics and that no other human social construct can make a similar claim. Mere social constructs do not design new antibiotics that save millions of lives, either. (If you’re still not convinced, or you just want to know how Einstein is in your pocket, you might watch this short Geomation on do-it-yourself cell phone kits.)
Video: GPS in Phone (5:40)
Dr. Richard Alley: This is a true story. Many years ago I had been resisting getting a newfangled cell phone I was scheduled to give a talk in Baltimore. There was a bit of snow but I just drove the 170 miles down from University Park. If you saw the 1964 nuclear war film Fail-Safe with Henry Fonda as the president, nuclear bombers were dispatched and they couldn't be recalled. That was me. They called my wife Cindy at home about 20 minutes after I left and said it was too dangerous to drive. She couldn't call me, so I drove the whole way down. I arrived, I found the venue locked. I called Cindy and she said, "You are getting a cell phone.", which I did.
What is a cell phone, really? It's just some sand for the glass, and the Silicon that goes in the computer chip, some oil or other organic material for the plastic, and the right rocks, the ones with the palladium and the rare Earth elements, and other things. Plus science and engineering and design and marketing. There's a computer chip. It's based on the transistor that was invented by Bell Labs. That was a private industry with a government-granted monopoly and Air Force money to develop it. It was designed with quantum mechanics from professors such as Bohr and Feynman, who taught at universities. It connects to the internet. When I first logged onto the internet it was the Arpanet, with Department of Defense funding to UCLA, Stanford, and Wisconsin, to improve communications among researchers for national security reasons.
When Cindy first got her GPS, the voice was a guy with a great Australian accent. My phone has a friendly-sounding lady in it. So here is a very light-hearted look at how the GPS works. And, if you're bored, you can think about how to redo this for the Australian guy. But for my phone.
Singing: There's a lady in my phone, so I never drive alone. She tells me where to go, so we get home, that nice lady in my phone. She relies on GPS, so we never get into a mess. It tells her where we are without a guess, as she relies on GPS. She listens to each satellite that she can get into her sight. They tell their time and place for day and night, as she listens to each satellite. Distance from each is time times rate, so she can triangulate, four-time differences give our place, and that works great. Distance from each is time times rate.
When I first met GPS my advisor, the late great Ian Whillans at Ohio State, was using it to survey the motion of Antarctic Ice streams. He had to bring the data home from Antarctica and post-process because the military was dithering them. It was called selective availability. GPS started as a U.S. military program, and then, precise positioning was a secret for national security reasons.
Singing: But there is complexity, space-time is warped by gravity. To get it right she needs relativity. For there is complexity. Einstein got that figured out. His equations work without a doubt. We're never lost when Albert is about, for EInstein got it figured out.
Special relativity and general relativity are required because the satellites move faster and are farther from Earth's gravity than clocks on Earth. It's about a 10-kilometer, six-mile, correction per day, or enough to degrade the accuracy of the phone in about two minutes. Without relativity, we'd start to get lost in two minutes. And fortunately, Einstein helps the nice lady or the Australian guy in my phone. Back in the dark ages of my youth, I suspect most people would have said that quantum mechanics and relativity are the most esoteric and useless of sciences. So now they're in our pockets and modern life as we know it would not be possible, without the technologies they enable. They come from public-private partnerships, building on university research, and based on the fact that science really works.
Science differs from other human endeavors in that its disputes are appealed to nature. With Art, you cannot judge whether Picasso or Rembrandt was a “better” painter. You can study the brushwork, perspective, social context, or whatever else, and learn about art from the discussion. However, you cannot reach an objective decision regarding who was the better painter. But, if asked whether Aristotle’s or Newton’s physics works better, we can answer the question with extraordinarily high confidence.
This is where the scientific method comes in. We study Aristotle’s ideas and Newton’s ideas until we figure out some way that they differ. This allows us to propose an experiment: if we do experiment A, Aristotle expects B to happen, and Newton expects C. Then, we do A and see what happens. If it comes out C, Aristotle is wrong. In reality, one test is never definitive—the fans of Aristotle might claim that the experiments were rigged, or the experimenters didn't really understand Aristotle's ideas and so did the wrong test, or that statistically there is still a slight chance that Aristotle is right. But after many tests, the answer becomes obvious. Science has then progressed—we’ve gotten rid of something that was wrong.
Science remains an exercise in uncertainty, though. If Newton “beats” Aristotle, that means Aristotle is wrong, but it does not mean that Newton is right—maybe he’s just lucky, or pretty close, but not quite right. As it turns out, Newton’s ideas fail for things that are really small, really large, or moving really fast, and we must turn to quantum mechanics and relativity. (But all that fancy physics reduces almost exactly to Newton’s description for things of size and speed that we usually deal with—bigger than atoms, smaller than galaxies, and much slower than the speed of light—so, Newton was and is fantastically useful. Our buildings and airplanes were designed using only Newtonian physics—quantum mechanics is not important for football stadiums or massive jets—although they were designed on computers that were designed using quantum mechanics.) Science thus cannot give the ultimate answers to anything because we are never sure whether we are right, close, or lucky. We can only say that, if we act as if the scientific results are true, we succeed (in curing diseases, finding oil, making cell phones that work, etc.).
Science is an expensive way of learning about the world. Suppose you are a farmer, and you are trying to feed yourself. You try an idea (say, burying fish heads with your corn seeds, or planting during the dark of the moon), and the corn grows well. So, you do that every year. If it works, great. If it does not work but does not hurt, it is no big problem. If it makes things worse, you might starve, but few others are bothered.
Now, suppose you are a modern farmer trying to feed 100 people. If you try something that makes things worse, many people may starve, and some may get mad at you before they do. So, you start asking whether the fish head works, and whether two fish heads would work better, or whether other parts of the fish would be better, and then you get serious and ask what is it in the fish head that works and how can you get a lot of that without killing fish, and so on. One test does not do it—crops grow well much of the time, so most things you test (such as planting in the dark of the moon) will seem to work even if they do not help.
The modern solution is to have a scientist helping the farmer, trying things carefully, and trying them many, many times, figuring out which ones work better, and communicating those results to others who are interested. All that testing takes a lot of effort, but it is cheaper in the long run for important things. Rather than 100 people each trying to feed themselves, and some failing and starving, we have a scientist, a farmer, a tractor manufacturer, a trucker, and a grocer feed all one hundred, freeing 95 to do something else. (Enjoy! You probably don’t have to spend the summer hoeing corn to keep from starving over the winter.) So, although science is expensive, for important things it is cheaper than ignorance. For unimportant things, living with a little more uncertainty may be easier.
Science has been wildly successful on simple questions: If I drop a rock, how fast will it fall? If I put a lot of a certain isotope of uranium in a small area, what will happen? If I use steel beams this big, in this pattern, how heavy a truck can drive over the bridge without breaking it? Most of physics, much of chemistry, and some of medicine fall in this “simple question” part of the world. For a little more discussion on the uses of science, see this short video on Silly Putty.
Video: Silly Putty (1:40)
Dr. Richard Alley: This is Silly Putty. You get it by mixing silicone oil and boric acid. It may not be the greatest triumph in the history of science, but it's fun! Occupational therapists have used silly putty for exercises for people recovering from hand injuries. NASA used it to stick down tools so they wouldn't float away in zero gravity. Scientists have mixed silly putty with graphene and made sensors that are so sensitive that they can measure the footfall of a spider. Look around you at all the applications of science through engineering, design, and marketing. The medicines and computers and phones and televisions and microwave ovens, like that one. The physics of how radiation interacts with water to heat a pizza in a microwave oven has a little bit to do with the physics that the Air Force uses to design sensors on heat-seeking missiles so that carbon dioxide doesn't block the view of the enemy bomber that you're trying to shoot down. And those physics are the same ones that climate scientists use when they're calculating how much warming we will get from the CO2 we release from fossil fuel burning. Science works. Science helps us. And science can be fun.
Science is gaining ground on some harder questions. Predicting weather or earthquakes, understanding and curing cancer, understanding and managing ecosystems and biodiversity—these are more complex, involve more interactions, and may have limits on predictability (chaos), but real, useful progress has been made, and improvement continues. The research frontiers often lie in these complex systems. Much of geology lies in complex systems, and we are in the midst of some great advances in geology.
Science has a long way to go on really tough questions, such as predicting how various actions will impact the working of society and the health and happiness of people. And, science cannot address many questions — “How should society work?” is a value judgment, not a question of reality, and is not part of science, although science is central in the discussion.
Science is restricted to the search for natural explanations of the world around us. This does not mean that science opposes religion or claims that there is no God. (Some scientists may do such things, but many other scientists do not.) Quite simply, no experimenter knows how to guarantee the cooperation of an omnipotent deity. A miracle, by definition, cannot be repeated reliably by anyone in any lab anywhere in the world, and so must fall outside of science.
In short, science is a human social activity but differs from other human social activities in that the ideas of science must be tested against reality. Science enjoys a special place in society because science is so successful. Science shows which ideas are wrong and identifies ideas scientists cannot disprove. If we act as if these not-yet-disproven ideas are true, we are successful in doing things. These not-yet-disproven ideas remain conditional because we might find better ideas in the future. Science keeps track of what works and what does not, to save future workers trouble. Science is a meritocracy—good ideas tend to rise to the top, no matter who originated those ideas. (This may take a while because scientists are human with human failings, and scientists certainly have a history of dismissing some ideas because they came from the wrong people, but the triumph of merit is more likely and faster in science than in most human activities.) Science tests the structure of knowledge continually—a good scientist does not tiptoe around the tower of knowledge put up by earlier scientists but tries to tear that tower down. Only those ideas sturdy enough to survive such attacks are saved, so the scientific edifice is exceptionally sturdy.